LOS ANGELES — At a time when some universities have publicly questioned the value of Black Studies departments and programs, the presence of hundreds of scholars at this year’s National Council for Black Studies conference is a strong sign that the academic field is indeed growing and thriving.
“I see how many young scholars believe in the field and who are doing important research in spite of the criticism and the attacks,” said Dr. Valerie Grim, the chair of the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University.
Grim has been attending NCBS conferences for the past 25 years and said that she’s encouraged by the research that her colleagues across the country are engaged in. “This gathering means that there is an intellectual space and an interest in exploring the lives of Black people around the world as subjects and not as imagined beings.”
Black Studies faculty and graduate students will present their interdisciplinary scholarship on topics ranging from the recent police shooting of Michael Brown—the unarmed 18-year-old Black man in Ferguson, Missouri—to a focus on the writers of the Harlem Renaissance.
Each year, newly-minted Ph.D.s and graduate students trek to the annual three-day conference to mingle with such veteran scholars in the field as Drs. Gerald Horne, Molefi Kete Asante, Karin Stanford and Maulana Karenga.
That kind of networking has become all the more important, particularly to faculty teaching at predominantly White institutions where Black Studies programs and departments are often undervalued and under-resourced.
Founded in 1975—a decade after Black Studies programs took off on college campuses across the country—NCBS sought to become the intellectual arm of the Civil Rights Movement and actively pushed to formalize the study of the African diaspora and expand its presence across the academic landscape.
